Welcome back, everyone. In this week’s column, I will be detailing and discussing three stock picks that I believe are strong fades or calls. As always, disclaimer, this is not financial advice, I am not a financial advisor (no matter how much I wish I were), do not take anything as financial advice, and do your own research! Okay now that we got that out of the way let’s get to some hot picks.

CALLS

Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company ($TSM) – Shares are up 6.01% as of October 5th (over the last 5 days) following the chip maker being upgraded to a buy by Morgan Stanely. Semiconductor microchips are the wave of the future and impact our day-to-day lives in countless ways through the Internet of Things. They are used in things such as smartphones, cars, TVs, and almost anything electronic. Morgan Stanely encapsulated this need for microchip processing power saying these semiconductors are “the enabler of future technology.” The chip sector should be rallying as tech product prices continue to fall and the reopening of economies following COVID continues. As a result, the increasing value of being early to markets as well as the secular power of pricing power into different economies makes $TSM my top pick of the week. 

Block (formerly Square) ($SQ) – Shares are up 8.63% as of October 5th (over the last 5 days). Formerly the company Square, readers will be very familiar with their tap-to-pay abilities as a market leader. Every time you see one of those white iPads that spin around and ask you “10 15 or 20% tip” – that’s square. As the merchant side in these payments, they have processed around 188$ billion in payments over the past fiscal year. On top of this massive merchant processing, they also control the popular financial app Cash App with more than 47 million active users. Recent acquisitions by block include Tidal – the music streaming platform, as well as Afterpay – the new popular credit payment platform that offers users the ability to buy-now, pay-later. This should result in earnings only continuing to skyrocket as now is the time to jump on young financial companies targeted at the younger demographic. This coupled with the trend toward cashless transactions, peer-to-peer transfers, and buy-now, pay-later activity makes Block a no-brainer call play.  

MercadoLibre ($MELI) – Shares are up 10.75% as of October 5th (over the last 5 days) and will only continue to grow. You’re probably wondering what this platform even is. Let me introduce you to the next Amazon. MercadoLibre is known in trading circles as the Amazon of Latin America. It runs and operates not only as an e-commerce platform but also as a fintech company. It absolutely dominates South America’s e-commerce searches in some of the most populous nations including Brazil and Argentina. In the second quarter of 2022, the platform moved $8.6 billion in merchandise volume and processed more than $120 billion annualized. Why do I love this play you might ask? They are young. Whether it be their fintech company Mercado credit which has more than tripled in size since 2021 and has $2.7 billion in outstanding loan balances. Or their e-commerce platform which dominates Latin America and is currently only moving 6% of Amazon’s merchandise volume.